I'm really scratching my head here because about a month before this post I ran a test on this with TOTALLY opposite results for a client of mine. The client has three brands with different sites and virtually the same products, this happened via a merger. All 3 sites are very authorititative and have massive organic rankings and traffic. They wanted to consolidate into one brand and I was consulting on this move. I commissioned test cases to see what the various results might be considering the fact that there is a huge amount of traffic at stake here.I setup 3 tests. 301 redirect. Canonical tag. 301 URL, replace URL on original site with a similar (placeholder) URL and add the canonical to that new URL for good measure (the reason for this was to maintain the structure and usability of the original site so that it could be used for paid advertising).The 301 worked the quickest. And the cross domain canonical failed miserably. In fact Google just went and indexed and ranked another similar page on the original domain rather than ranking any page on the site I was working to reference! All pages redirected or being used for canonical reference were very similar to each other so the changes in rankings and authority should have worked out. Overall, each page that I used any form of the canonical tag on totally failed and we monitored things for over 5 weeks and still no results. I'm wondering if anyone else has seen the cross domain canonical fail to work as miserably as I did in my test?

I know that I am a bit late to the party here but I was digging into Local tracking in more detail today to spec out a process for my agency and I thought of a good question for you. I've heard of people losing ALL of their Local rankings after tagging their URLs for GA the way you suggest. Jim at LuanMetrics talks about it here, http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/04/29/tracking-google-product-search-2/.

I've heard this before and heard that the way to go when adding tracking URLs to links is to reconfigure your GA tracking code to use the "#" instead of the "?". http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/02/02/hashing-it-out-referral-tracking/. And he even goes a step further by suggesting setting up vanity URLs and redirecting to the tagged URL that is using the #.

Any thoughts on this idea and the idea that you will lose all of your rankings if you use GA tagging on your URLs.

These are interesting points, and I’d be curious to see if Google Analytics will implement any of this tracking in the future, such as for mobile devices, check ins, mentions. Despite all the social media, I would not doubt Google to sway away from the most important ranking factor: quality link signals. Inevitably, the way Google ranks will keep changing and they’ll keep on adding to the mix, but I’d imagine the algorithm will continue to highlight links as most valuable for the time being.

Totally agree Wiep. I am wondering why a site with SOLID #2 rankings for a very long time suddenly was "banned" for just 4 link buys. The site had to have a fairly mature backlink profile and domain. Plus sites that rank well (are trusted) tend to get away with more.

The 4 links must have been sitewide links and all of them obviously targeting the same exact anchor text and having all gone live at about the same time. I'm not sure one could leave a bigger/easier footprint for Google to find. That is one of the few ways I know of to get a site banned for paid linking.

What about the idea that anyone can buy links and have them pointed to your site??? A fairly easy way to oust the competition. How can Google penalize you when you did nothing wrong?

Because of this Google simply has to find it hard to penalize the site getting the link. And this is backed by the fact that 99% of all paid link penalties are put on the site giving the link and not the site paying for or getting the link. The worst that happens, 99% of the time, to a site buying links is that the links are devalued and you end up paying for links that are no longer passing juice.

Another thing is that linking is the foundation of Google's algo, it is what set them apart from the competition back in the day and it will always be the most impactful metric. I do not see a way for them to get around this. Engagement stats like CTR, time on site, etc are just too easy to game and if they were weighted too heavily then porn sites would rule the world!